Finally, if the bureaucracies of industry and government demanded that men and women become psychologically fragmented specialists, the technology-induced experience of togetherness
would allow them to become both self-sufﬁcient and whole once again.
For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual
output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they
rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political
process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan.
Introduction
[ 5 ]
Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision
of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of
the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see
the possibility of global harmony.

Baldwin, Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (New York: John
Wiley, 1996); Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe
(Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Thomas T. K. Zung, ed., Buckminster
Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium (New York: St. Martin’s,
2001); and Michael John Gorman, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for
Mobility (New York: Rizzoli, 2005).
See Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 81–85, for a good summary of
these recent developments.
The foremost history of the kibbutz is Henry Near, The Kibbutz
Movement: A History, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992; London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997). The ﬁrst volume is subtitled Origins and Growth, 1909–1939; the second, Crisis and Achievement, 1939–1995.
Daniel Gavron, The Kibbutz: Awakening From Utopia (Lanham: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 2000), 4. This is a very good introduction to the
topic. Further studies of the kibbutzim include Yonina Talmon, Family
and Community in the Kibbutz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1972); Melford E.

…

In 2008 and 2009 two major museums, New York’s Whitney
and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, successively
exhibited “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe.”
This was the ﬁrst major retrospective on Fuller since his death
in 1983 and, like the New York Public Library exhibit, bespoke a
more mature acknowledgment of the continued importance of
utopianism, which, in this case, combined utopian writings,
structures, and communities.20
In 1968 architectural critic Allan Temko published a provocative
essay in Horizon magazine entitled “Which Guide to the Promised
Land? Fuller or Mumford?” Without taking sides, Temko insightfully compared the differing visions of contemporaries Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) and Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), both
then at the height of their power and inﬂuence. Despite their vastly
differing viewpoints, each had become a hero to younger audiences: Mumford because of his increasingly hostile analyses of
modern technological advance gone awry, as in the Vietnam War;
Fuller because of his steadily more optimistic views of contemporary technology’s potential to transform the world and to create
new communities.21
The exhibit provided a remarkably rich perspective.

for
Hackers by Steven Levy, copyright 1984.
PRAEGER PUBLISHERS
Society, edited
for quote
by
Bill
Voyd from Shelter and
by Paul Oliver, copyright 1969.
SAN FRANCISCO FOCUS MAGAZINE
view with Stewart Brand
in the
for quotes
from an
inter-
February 1985 issue.
SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE
for quotes from issues #6, 1967, and
#12, 1967. Reprinted with permission of Allan Cohen,
Editor.
ST.
MARTIN'S PRESS
for
Buckminster
Fuller,
An
Autobiographical
Monologue!Scenario by Robert Snyder, copyright 1970.
ST.
MARTIN'S PRESS
copyright 1978.
for Children of Prosperity
by Hugh Gardner,
The Times They Are A-Changing
A shortened version of this essay was presented
at
San Francisco State University
Alvin Fine Lecture.
1985 as the
in April
A few weeks before the event,
student in the Public Affairs Office called
arrange
some campus
publicity.

…

It
17
seemed
to
be saying that
ingenuity deserved to be celebrated
-
from the stone axe and American Indian medicine
to
all
human
modern
Clearly,
electronics.
so
in
saying,
the
Catalog spoke for an audience that wanted to see
things that way.
Or
rather, the
voices that could do that job.
which
it
Catalog found the
And of all the voices to
gave a forum, none was to become more
prominent than Buckminster Fuller, the
formed a generation
that
it
spaceship called Planet Earth, and
write
its
who presumed to
"operating manual"
Now, Buckminster
career.
man who in-
was already on board a
Fuller had a long,
long
His prefabricated Dymaxion House of the
late twenties (also called "the four
dimensional
liv-
ing machine") dates back to the grandparents of the
countercultural
ward, his
generation.
story
life
From
that point
went through many ups and
downs; but there can be no question
(when Fuller was
in his seventies)
Not only did he make the
magazine
(in
that the sixties
were his zenith.

…

for-
Thanks
to that
18
him
to the
at
San
Bay Area
appearance and subse-
him
quently to the prominence Stewart Brand gave
in the
Whole Earth Catalog,
was launched on
and most spectacular phase of
the final
On
Fuller
his career.
the first page of the Catalog, the full corpus of
Fuller's
works was generously presented under the
inscription: "the insights of
itiated this catalog."
became
From
Buckminster Fuller
in-
that point forward, Fuller
the necessary presence at
New Age
confer-
ences, symposia, and workshops: a sort of peripatetic global wizard
audience
down
who might tie his
awe-inspired
for four or five hours at a stretch
while he recited the history of the universe.
What was
it
that
made
this
odd figure so
remarkably influential in countercultural circles? In
part,
it
may have been
which appealed
elders
had
to
young people
and finding so
to
do with
his grandfatherly persona,
his
in search of
few.

Combining his Midwestern roots with a Merry Prankster sense of cosmic adventure, Brand would create in 1968 an irresistible format in the first Whole Earth Catalog. A compendium of stuff patterned after the Sears and L. L. Bean mail-order catalogs crossed with Consumer Reports, the catalog struck a deep nerve that transcended the counterculture. Brand had come upon the idea of a “Whole Earth” two years earlier, after hearing a lecture by Buckminster Fuller. One day in North Beach, he had been sitting huddled in a blanket on the roof of his three-story apartment building looking out over the city. Having taken “a few mikes of LSD,”2 Brand was suddenly struck by the fact that the city’s buildings were not laid out in perfect parallel lines. It seemed to him that, since the surface of the earth was curved, they actually must diverge just slightly.

…

Although it resembled mainstream catalogs in many respects, it differed in a manner that struck right at a dualism that Brand himself would coin years later: that strange quality about information that was both easy and freely shareable and immensely valuable. “Information wants to be free,” he said, and then he added in typical Brandian fashion, “and it wants to be very expensive.”
The first Whole Earth Catalog was a full-on tour of the counterculture, a hodgepodge of product descriptions, advice, commentary, and quirky features laid out in a seemingly haphazard fashion, beginning with Buckminster Fuller and ending with the I Ching; it became an instant bible and a serendipitous tool for finding interesting stuff. In doing so, it also helped a scattered community that was in the process of defining itself find an identity.
“We are as gods and we might as well get used to it.” Brand’s introduction began with a phrase borrowed from British anthropologist Edmund Leach that is often remembered and quoted.

…

Evans decided that he would become the interface between the super-straight world of information technology, SRI, and the wild and free world of the embryonic alternative society that was blossoming on the Peninsula.11 He felt that a lot of the ideas about community that Brand was exploring and the ideas that Engelbart had about a “bootstrapped community” were on the same continuum, and so he started to actively encourage a dialogue between the two worlds. Engelbart, he believed, had a receptive mind.
In 1969, at Evans’s urging, Engelbart took a small group of Augment researchers to visit a commune known as Lama that had been started by Steve Durkee and Steve Baer in the mountains north of Taos, New Mexico. Baer was a disciple of Buckminster Fuller and the creator of a novel type of domelike building called a “zome.” Durkee was an artist who was Brand’s former roommate and mentor/guru.
As hard as Evans tried to bridge the gap, he ended up increasing the stress on Engelbart, who in principle was open to new ideas but who was increasingly obsessing over losing control of his group. Evans continued in his quest and in doing so became one of the main players in organizing the Paradam Conference, an event held on a farm near Santa Barbara the weekend after the Woodstock music festival.

There has long been a split in the literature on gaming between narratologists,
who emphasize the “stories” that video games generate, and the ludologists,
who concentrate on game play as primary. See Ian Bogost, Unit Operations:
An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 68.
26 . The sixth chapter of R. Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1981) is devoted to the world game, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute
maintains a page on its cite with numerous resources, available at
<http://www.bﬁ.org/our_programs/who_is_buckminster_fuller/design_science/
world_game>.
CHAPTER 4: WEB n.0
1. See <http://ﬂickr.com>; <http://www.del.icio.us>. The term was coined by
Thomas Vander Wal. See Daniel H. Pink, “Folksonomy,” New York Times
Sunday Magazine, December 11, 2005, available at <http://www.nytimes.
com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?

…

In the context
of the assertions offered in the rest of this book, however,
I would say that the pressing issue is whether individual games
or games as systems can accrete in such a way as to create
72
UNIMODERNISM
what one could call ludic stickiness.
One game that was indeed sticky involved players running
around a huge and unconventional map of the world, working together to deploy resources and innovative technology to
make not just their team but rather the whole globe a better
place. More than a generation ago, the polymath futurist
and designer R. Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame)
proposed this multiplayer “design science process for arriving at economic, technological and social insights pertinent
to humanity’s future envolvement [sic, a signature Fuller neologism] aboard our planet Earth.” Originally called the “great
logistics game” and then the “world peace game,” it was best
known simply as the “World Game.” Inspired in part by the war
gaming that planners engaged in to prepare for the hot battleﬁelds of World War II and the colder, yet protracted conﬂicts
with the Soviet Union that followed, the World Game was
a revamping of these strategies to think about how best to
use resources to ensure planetary happiness.

However, advancements in computing and
visualization technologies over the past five decades have made it
possible to realize the original purpose of the Expo ’67 pavilion.
The nonprofit Buckminster Fuller Institute, which is dedicated
to finding innovative solutions to some of humanity’s most pressing problems, wants to use the fiftieth anniversary of Expo ’67
as an impetus to finally fully realize Fuller’s dream of creating a
control room for Spaceship Earth. By renovating and incorporating
modern technology into the fifty-year-old geodesic dome, which is
currently the Biosphère Environmental Museum, it hopes to create a global hub for collaborative international problem solving.
This tool would be made completely open to all, so that it can be
of value to society as a whole. As a result, according to Elizabeth
Thompson, executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute,
“planetary planning could be truly democratized, and changing
the course of Spaceship Earth can become a cooperative human
effort, rather than a task relegated to policy makers.”

…

There is
no reason a citizens’ group, nongovernment organization, or social
enterprise should go it alone. The establishment of this Unity
Node would allow us to create “dashboards of Earth,” or a control
room for Spaceship Earth, where critical data affecting our global
society could be presented in an actionable way.
The idea of creating this type of information system is not new.
In the 1960s, renowned inventor and visionary Buckminster Fuller
popularized the term “Spaceship Earth,” and he devoted his life
to identifying and communicating the interconnections between
economic, social, and environmental systems to improve life on
our planet. Long before environmental stewardship was prevalent
in society, Fuller addressed the reality of our interconnectedness
and the synergy that could be produced by working together to
find ways to stop wasting the planet’s natural resources.

He died in 1996 at the age of 83 having published 1,475 academic papers, of which many were monumental and all substantial
Tellingly, when people stopped doing mathematics he said they “had died”. When they died he said they “had left”.
This unusual use of language reveals something about the way he approached the world and its problems. Of them all, by far the most telling is: “My brain is open”.
Buckminster Fuller was one of the great creative forces of his time. He invented the geodesic dome, the term Spaceship Earth, and was President of Mensa
He urged people to be more precise in the way they spoke about things so that they could think more effectively.
“I suggest to audiences that they say, ‘I’m going “outstairs” and “instairs”.’ At first that sounds strange to them; they all laugh about it. But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realise that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth.

…

But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realise that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real ‘reality’.”
As you know, it didn’t catch on. But it demonstrates the fierce independence of thought that gave him the ability to see and think differently. Paul Erdos and Buckminster Fuller perceived the world differently and so they used different words to label everyday activities and this in turn helped them approach problems and opportunity differently.
Now, if you apply such different thinking to the fast-growing entrepreneurial business in the world we live in right now you might get “The Offer”. Zappos, the disruptive, fast-growing online shoe company doesn’t conform to much.

The worlds of architecture, design, and culture have identified Smith as one to watch with her ideas on low-impact design, mass production, and alternative forms of community. She talks passionately but with authority about archetype typologies, connected lifestyles, and tribal solutions. Smith proudly admits that she is heavily influenced by the thinking of the legendary designer and pioneer of sustainability Buckminster Fuller, sharing his passion to figure out the question: “How we can make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?”20
Smith was sitting in her offices at Ecoshack, a Los Angeles–based experimental design studio, when she realized that she could no longer afford to be green. It was early in the economic crash of 2008.

The motivating idea of the book is that it is only through such fully three-dimensional and critical perspectives that the political, social and urban struggles of our rapidly urbanizing world can possibly be understood.
Strap yourself in, then, for a wild and startling ride through the three-dimensional geographies of our world.
Part One: Above
Social scientists need to raise their eyes from the ground
Martin Parker
A 1928 drawing by visionary designer, architect and polymath Buckminster Fuller, emphasizing the global, spiritual, practical and vertical challenges facing engineering, architecture and human life inherent within his idea of ‘Spaceship Earth’. (Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1968).
1.
Satellite: Enigmatic Presence
We live in a satellite enabled age. The satellites flying above us are not abstract agents of science but part of the critical life support system we all depend on, every day

…

Residents in the zones just outside the city’s business district wondered if they could benefit from an extended project or even of a second dome was possible.71
Designers in Beijing are meanwhile looking to upscale the International School’s ideas to a much larger dome enclosing a major new privatised urban park in the city.72 Architects have also suggested burying copper coils under parks to create electrostatic fields which attract smog particles from the immediate atmosphere.73
These examples of the growing interiorisation of ‘nature’ powerfully echo Buckminster Fuller’s influential ruminations between the 1940s and 1960s on the possibilities of dome-like constructions at various scales within which urban air could be precisely controlled. Famously, in 1960 Fuller suggested a giant, 400-tonne glass geodesic dome encompassing Midtown Manhattan which would permanently sustain what he called a ‘Garden of Eden’ climate’.74 Fuller claimed that ‘the cost of snow removal in New York City would pay for the dome in 10 years.’75
Today’s ‘bubbles’ for the precise manipulation of urban air contrast sharply, however, with Fuller’s urban planning ideas in one crucial respect.

See Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997).
2 American girls in polkadotted knee-length dresses: for photographs of the American exhibition in Sokolniki Park, and of the Muscovite visitors to it, see Life Magazine, vol. 47 no. 6, 10 August 1959, pp. 28–35, with little plastic beakers on p. 31; for descriptions of the exhibits, see Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain; for a reading of the design politics of Buckminster Fuller’s dome, see Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War’ in Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford, eds, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 167–92; for press reaction in the US, see New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4.
3 She had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market: that is to say, at one of the legal bazaars or car-boot sales (without car boots) where Soviet citizens could sell their possessions second-hand.

…

See Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997).
2 American girls in polkadotted knee-length dresses: for photographs of the American exhibition in Sokolniki Park, and of the Muscovite visitors to it, see Life Magazine, vol. 47 no. 6, 10 August 1959, pp. 28–35, with little plastic beakers on p. 31; for descriptions of the exhibits, see Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain; for a reading of the design politics of Buckminster Fuller’s dome, see Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War’ in Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford, eds, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 167–92; for press reaction in the US, see New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4.
3 She had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market: that is to say, at one of the legal bazaars or car-boot sales (without car boots) where Soviet citizens could sell their possessions second-hand.

…

Inside, the dome was all one huge room, with no ceiling, just the same crisply flimsy skin, which you could see from here was organised into six-pointed stars or flowers, repeating over and over. Now the result seemed halfway between an organism and a mechanism. It puzzled her a bit that the Americans would pick such a thing as the centrepiece of their exhibition. It was certainly impressive, in its way, but you could tell that it sat lightly on the earth, and would soon be gone. It looked strangely casual.
‘Mm-hmm,’ said Fyodor.
‘… designed by a famous American architect, Buckminster Fuller,’ one of the girls was saying. Right across the big floor of the dome, the same speech was being made to close-packed circles of listeners as more and more people poured in. White-gloved hands pointed to exhibits around the base of the walls, and to the cluster of seven giant white screens overhead, which filled most of the span of the golden wall in front of them. She tried to see the computer they had been told about with the answers to four thousand supposedly comprehensive questions about the United States.

Comments on FUTURE SHOCK
C. P. Snow: "Remarkable ... No one ought to have the nerve to pontificate on our present
worries without reading it."
R. Buckminster Fuller: "Cogent ... brilliant ... I hope vast numbers will read Toffler's
book."
Betty Friedan: "Brilliant and true ... Should be read by anyone with the responsibility of
leading or participating in movements for change in America today."
Marshall McLuhan: "FUTURE SHOCK ... is 'where it's at.'"
Robert Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment: "A magnificent job ... Must reading."
John Diebold: "For those who want to understand the social and psychological
implications of the technological revolution, this is an incomparable book."
WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Explosive ... Brilliantly formulated."
LONDON DAILY EXPRESS: "Alvin Toffler has sent something of a shock-wave
through Western society."

…

Less patrician New Yorkers, whose ancestors landed in America more
recently, arriving there from the barrios of Puerto Rico, the villages of Eastern Europe or the
plantations of the South, might voice their feelings quite differently. Yet the "Vanishing past"
is a real phenomenon, and it is likely to become far more widespread, engulfing even many of
the history-drenched cities of Europe.
Buckminster Fuller, the designer-philosopher, once described New York as a "continual
evolutionary process of evacuations, demolitions, removals, temporarily vacant lots, new
installations and repeat. This process is identical in principle to the annual rotation of crops in
farm acreage—plowing, planting the new seed, harvesting, plowing under, and putting in
another type of crop ... Most people look upon the building operations blocking New York's
streets ... as temporary annoyances, soon to disappear in a static peace.

…

Throughout the advanced technological
societies, and particularly among those I have characterized as "the people of the future,"
commuting, traveling, and regularly relocating one's family have become second nature.
Figuratively, we "use up" places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of
Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to
human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive,
widespread and significant their migrations are.
THE 3,000,000-MILE CLUB
In 1914, according to Buckminster Fuller, the typical American averaged about 1,640 miles
per year of total travel, counting some 1,300 miles of just plain everyday walking to and fro.
This meant that he traveled only about 340 miles per year with the aid of horse or mechanical
means. Using this 1,640 figure as a base, it is possible to estimate that the average American
of that period moved a total of 88,560 miles in his lifetime.* Today, by contrast, the average
American car owner drives 10,000 miles per year—and he lives longer than his father or
grandfather.

Such leaders have learned the secret of the “helpers’ high:” we feel good when we make other people happy. It creates value for the giver and the recipient, as well as for the larger community. Servant leaders cultivate the noble virtue of generosity. They embrace transpersonal values—such as goodness, justice, truth, love, the alleviation of suffering, the salvation or enlightenment of others—that lift them to higher levels of consciousness.8
The story of Buckminster Fuller provides a great illustration of the power of servant leadership. At age thirty-two, Fuller was living in low-income public housing in Chicago. His daughter had recently died from polio and spinal meningitis. Fuller was drinking heavily, chronically depressed, and seriously considering committing suicide. One night, while standing on a bridge and trying to decide whether to jump to his death, he asked himself questions about the meaning of life.

…

He would begin “an experiment, to determine how much a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humankind.”9 The answer, it turns out, is “quite a lot.” Over the next fifty-five years until his death, he patented over two thousand inventions, wrote twenty-five books, and went down in history as one of the greatest thinkers, inventors, and servant leaders who ever lived. The Buckminster Fuller game of doing as much good as possible to benefit the world is a game we can all play. Servant leaders show us how to do exactly this.10
Integrity: The Synthesis of the Virtues
Perhaps the most important virtue of conscious leaders is integrity. Honesty is often used as a synonym for integrity, but integrity is a more comprehensive virtue because, while it is partly about honesty, it goes beyond just telling the truth.

…

Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live By (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004), 3.
5. John A. Byrne, World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), 52.
6. We first heard this articulated by Debashis Chatterjee.
7. Liu, Conversations on Leadership.
8. Zohar and Marshall, Spiritual Capital, 55.
9. Wikipedia, s.v. “Buckminster Fuller,” last modified June 18, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminister_Fuller.
10. The best book we are aware of on servant leadership is still the one that identified it originally: Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (New York: Paulist Press, 1977).
11. Robert C. Solomon, A Better Way to Think About Business: How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate Success (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 40–43.
12.

The importance of purpose
We must also keep in mind that it is not only about talent and skills. Technology enables greater efficiency, which most people want. Yet they also wish to feel that they are not merely part of a process but of something bigger than themselves. Karl Marx expressed his concern that the process of specialization would reduce the sense of purpose that we all seek from work, while Buckminster Fuller cautioned that the risks of over-specialization tend “to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerful generalized principles.”30
Now, faced with a combination of increased complexity and hyper-specialization, we are at a point where the desire for purposeful engagement is becoming a major issue. This is particularly the case for the younger generation who often feel that corporate jobs constrain their ability to find meaning and purpose in life.

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Algue, 2004. 0 Tahon and Bouroullec.
Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Algue, 2004. Photograph by Andreas Sutterlin. 0 Vitra.
Vehicle design, too, has a strong tradition of concept cars designed to be displayed in shows to communicate future design directions and gauge customer reaction. Roland Barthes's famous essay celebrating the Citroen DS in Mythologies captures the magic of these visions at their high point. Buckminster Fuller's 1930s prototype Dymaxion car promoted new ways of thinking about safety and aerodynamics. More recent studies have focused on style and imagery; Marc Newson's 027C (1999) for Ford aimed to introduce new cultural references to car design, and Chris Bangle's GINA (2008) concept car for BMW suggested replacing current materials with futuristic shape-shifting materials that adjust the car's aerodynamics on the move.

…

BIG DESIGN: THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE
Although inspirational, these externalized dreams and fantasies are still quite modest in scale-a disadvantage of working outside official systems, semiunderground, or in the privacy of one's home or studio. There are also dreamers working within the system of industry, funding organizations, universities, and markets, who are attempting to imagine a better world for all, even if sometimes they might reflect their own personal obsessions.
Buckminster Fuller would usually spring to mind as an example of this but his visions are a little too technological and rational for us. Norman Bel Geddes, however, mixed modern, everyday technologies with dreams, fantasy, and the irrational. He went well beyond problem solving, using design to give form to dreams. In his Highways & Horizons exhibit, better known as Futurama, for the General Motors pavilion in the 1939 New York World's Fair, Bel Geddes designed an environment of large-scale models featuring a national network of expressways, illustrating its implications and possibilities twenty years into the future.

So Efrem drifted to California, then back East again, then back to California. It took a while for him to see how computers could be used for social good, and each time he glimpsed the possibilities he suspected betrayal. One interesting project he’d been involved with was the World game. A group of California programmers, philosophers, and engineers constructed a simulation of the world. It was based on an idea by Buckminster Fuller, where you could try out all sorts of changes and see their effect on the world. For days, people ran around suggesting things and running the game on the computer. Not much came of it in terms of suggestions on how to run the world, but a lot of people met others with similar views.
Not long afterward, Efrem stumbled upon Resource One, with Lee mired in its bowels. He thought it was a crock.

…

Albrecht was involved in starting the loosely run “computer education division” of the nonprofit foundation called the Portola Institute, which later spawned the Whole Earth Catalog. He met a teacher from Woodside High School on the peninsula, named LeRoy Finkel, who shared his enthusiasm about teaching kids computers; with Finkel he began a computer-book publishing company named Dymax, in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s trademarked word “dymaxion,” combining dynamism and maximum. The for-profit company was funded by Albrecht’s substantial stock holdings (he had been lucky enough to get into DEC’s first stock offering), and soon the company had a contract to write a series of instructional books on BASIC.
Albrecht and the Dymax crowd got hold of a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. To house this marvelous machine, they moved the company to new headquarters in Menlo Park.

…

He took a few extra chips along with him, and traded the chips with others, eventually winding up with a keyboard and a few RAM chips. “We’re talking outright thievery,” he later explained; but in Homebrew terms, Sokol was liberating a neat hack from the proprietary oppressors. Pong was neat, and should belong to the world. And in Homebrew, exchanges like that were free and easy.
Years earlier, Buckminster Fuller had developed the concept of synergy—the collective power, more than the sum of the parts, that comes of people and/or phenomena working together in a system—and Homebrew was a textbook example of the concept at work. One person’s idea would spark another person into embarking on a large project, and perhaps beginning a company to make a product based on that idea. Or, if someone came up with a clever hack to produce a random number generator on the Altair, he would give out the code so everyone could do it, and by the next meeting someone else would have devised a game that utilized the routine.

While it names the organization of a planetary-scale computing infrastructure, my purpose is to leverage it toward a broader program for platform design. In the depiction of this incipient megastructure, we can see not just new machines but also still-embryonic geopolitical institutions and social systems as well. For these, The Stack is powerful and dangerous, both remedy and poison, a utopian and dystopian machine at once (it can go either way, and as Buckminster Fuller said, it will be touch and go until the last instant). As a model, The Stack is simultaneously a portrait of the system we have but perhaps do not recognize, and an antecedent of a future territory, and with both at hand, we hope to prototype the alien cosmopolitanisms these engender for us and suggest to us.
Planetary-scale computation both distorts and reforms modern jurisdiction and political geography and produces new forms of these in its own image.

…

He used the example of Google and said it was a pity that although Google had retreated from China, its service was still accessible in China: “It's like the relationship between riverbed and water. Water has no nationality, but riverbeds are sovereign territories, we cannot allow polluted water from other nation-states to enter our country.”13 This is an amazingly succinct rehearsal of the older European nomos's juridical separation of land and sea, fixed and liquid, made into parable.14 While Fang likely was not familiar with Buckminster Fuller's admonition that “the fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the ocean,” Fuller, it is more certain, was never given the assignment, as Fang was, of building a glass dome for a billion Internet users.15
Shifting the figure of water from a metaphor to geography, consider that for Schmitt's history of the nomos (that is, Carl Schmitt, not Eric Schmidt), the territorial domain of nations was always defended by the naval capacity over the omnidirectional glacis of the ocean in light of Google's filed patent on water-based data centers.16 This floating cyberinfrastructure would, in principle, greatly reduce the energy and cooling costs of hosting and serving the peta- and exabytes of data that will constitute an eventual planetary cloud computing platform.

And third, though recycled rent requires government action to get started, it has the political virtue of avoiding the bigger/smaller government tug-of-war that paralyzes Washington today. It is, after all, property income that doesn’t enlarge government. It could therefore appeal to, or at least not offend, voters and politicians in the center, left, and right.
A TRIM TAB IS A TINY FLAP ON A SHIP or airplane’s rudder. The designer Buckminster Fuller often noted that moving a trim tab slightly turns a ship or a plane dramatically. If we think of our economy as a moving vessel, the same metaphor can be applied to rent. Depending on how much of it is collected and whether it flows to a few or to many, rent can steer an economy toward extreme inequality or a large middle class. It can also guide an economy toward excessive use of nature or a safe level of use.

Every living organism is on its way to becoming. And the human organism even more so, because among all living beings (that we know about) we are the most open-ended. We have just started our evolution as Homo sapiens. As both parent and child of the technium—evolution accelerated—we are nothing more and nothing less than an evolutionary ordained becoming. “I seem to be a verb,” the inventor/philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said.
We can likewise say: The technium is a tendency, not an entity. The technium and its constituent technologies are more like a grand process than a grand artifact. Nothing is complete, all is in flux, and the only thing that counts is the direction of movement. So if the technium has a direction, where is it pointed? If the greater forms of technologies are inevitable, what is next?

These notes describe Nelson’s vision in detail. They
cover the ELF design, Xanadu, StretchText and Nelson’s screen-based
graph display idea. Nelson didn’t want to hover around in the background
watching the team build a part of his vision; he wanted the design to be
produced as faithfully as possible. ‘Let’s put it this way: I feel that van Dam
should have treated me the way he would have treated Buckminster Fuller
if he’d asked Buckminster Fuller to come in’ (Nelson 2011). That didn’t
happen.
As observed previously, van Dam and his team wanted to explore the
hypertext concept, but they also had their own plans (which Nelson strenuously
opposed). The team set out to design a dual-purpose system for authoring,
editing and printing text documents, which could also be used to browse and
query written materials nonsequentially.

”
— Neva Goodwin
Co-director, Global Development And Environment
Institute, Tufts University
“
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the public
response.”
— Nancy Jack Todd
Editor, Annals of Earth newsletter
“
Hurricane Katrina will be remembered as the
most important turning point in the world's awareness and reaction to global warming.”
— Jeffrey Hollender
President & Chief Inspired Protagonist,
Seventh Generation
“
We can thank Herman Daly for the concept of full cost accounting, Buckminster Fuller for the power and possibility of thinking differently, and E.F.
Schumacher as the father of the act locally/think globally movement.”
— Jeffrey Hollender
96
chapter 4 : The End of Nature
“
I’ve heard lots of criticism of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, from
inside the green movement, but we’re already converted. The mainstream
media coverage and my conversations with non-movement people have
convinced me that it has done so much to bring them on board

…

Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble,
by Lester Brown. W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, by Al Gore. Plume,
1993.
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We
Can Do Before It’s Too Late, by Thom Hartmann. Three Rivers Press, 1998.
Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, by Herman
Daly. Beacon Press, 1992.
Critical Path, by Buckminster Fuller. St. Martin’s Press, 1981.
The Home Energy Diet: How to Save Money by Making Your House Energy
Smart, by Paul Scheckel. New Society Publishers, 2005.
The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place, by John Abrams. Chelsea Green, 2005.
The NEW VILLAGE GREEN
99
5 ONE-STRAW REVOLUTION
“
If we throw mother nature out the window, she
comes back in the door with a pitchfork.”
— Masanobu Fukuoka
100
T
he most profound learning experience of my college career was reading
Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal
Origins and Nature of Man, long since out of print, but available, used, on
Amazon.

The dreams of elevator operators looked like they couldn’t be realized with conventional materials.16
Then nanotechnology burst on the scene in the 1990s. The ability to manipulate matter at the level of atoms or molecules opened up new technologies and a dizzying array of potential new applications. Some of the most exciting materials were made of pure carbon. Fullerenes are carbon molecules in the form of spheres, tubes, and other shapes. The name is a nod to the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, since the first of the new molecules to be created was a tiny spherical cage made of sixty carbon atoms, resembling one of Fuller’s geodesic domes. Soon after buckyballs were isolated, scientists learned how to create carbon nanotubes, interlinked carbon atoms rolled in a cylinder a millionth of a meter across. Carbon nanotubes are stable and they conduct heat and electricity extremely well.

…

Their mission was to live in a self-sustaining environment for two years, as a prototype of how humans might one day live on Mars, or in space.1
Texas billionaire Ed Bass sank $150 million into the project, and it was variously characterized in the press as a utopian dream or a rich man’s folly. The occupants wore jumpsuits out of Star Trek—which, depending on your point of view, made them look like either consummate professionals or inmates at a county jail. Few had serious scientific credentials. The soaring architecture was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, but there was also a darker backstory associated with founder John Allen, who ran a commune in New Mexico that had the trappings of a cult. Allen was a metallurgist and Harvard MBA who experimented with peyote and spent the late 1960s lecturing in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. In 1974, when young Yale dropout Ed Bass arrived at Allen’s Synergia Ranch, the two men instantly hit it off, based on their shared interest in the environment.

The solutions were a mixed bag, ranging from the touching entry of two young girls who live in Cabrini-Green to the sort of conceptual posturing that characterizes so much of contemporary architecture. One entry mysteriously linked Cabrini-Green to the tidal cycles of Lake Michigan, another incorporated an amusement park into the public housing project, yet another nastily suggested “circling the wagons for safety” by creating fortresslike housing structures surrounded by masts with batteries of high-intensity spotlights. One designer, apparently a devotee of Buckminster Fuller, produced a solution to low-income housing based on prefabricated concrete spheres: the houses resembled lightbulbs.
The winning project was the work of two assistant professors of architecture at North Dakota State University in Fargo and a newly graduated student. Jim Nelson, Don Faulkner, and Larry Carcoana’s proposal brims with midwestern good sense. Rebuild the old street grid, the designers suggest, and fill in the open spaces with traditional row houses oriented to the streets.

…

Since I wrote this, Stern’s eclecticism has expanded to include modernism—in a number of campus buildings and in several office towers, notably the fifty-eight-story, all-glass Comcast Center in Philadelphia. Thus far at least, the residential work remains stylistically traditional, although a number of apartment interiors have been modernist, and with Stern you never know.
A Humble Architect
Montreal’s Expo 67 was the last world’s fair where architects were treated as stars. The two most impressive national pavilions were Frei Otto’s tentlike West German pavilion and Buckminster Fuller’s U.S. pavilion, a large geodesic dome. Arthur Erickson’s delicate wood pyramid housing Man and Health made up for the rather lackluster Canadian pavilion. But the brightest star at Expo was a newcomer, Moshe Safdie, a twenty-eight-year-old Israeli-born Canadian who, according to legend, had turned his student thesis into the fair’s most striking attraction. The British magazine The Architects’ Journal called Habitat “one of the most advanced housing projects ever conceived and certainly the boldest exercise in industrialized building methods attempted to date.”

There is no charge to volunteer, but get your dibs in early. More than 800 people are already on the volunteer list.
HOW TO GET IN TOUCH
Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, P.O. Box 198, 301 Fifth Street, Medora, ND 58645, 800-633-6721 or 701-623-4444, www.medora.com.
CHAPTER 3
brain retreats
I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about in this extraordinary moment?
—R. Buckminster Fuller, American visionary, architect, and inventor
When you were five, you wanted the answers to everything. You wanted to know where rain came from, why some people were bald, how music came out of that little box called a radio. Back then, it was okay not to know everything. It was perfectly acceptable to ask questions, wonder why, want to know more. But at some point, you figured out it wasn’t “cool” to admit you didn’t know something.

…

Although these days you can find a yoga studio and a Gestalt center on every corner, the two retreat centers listed below are the veritable godfathers of the human potential movement. They both have incredibly beautiful campuses, workshop leaders that are a veritable who’s who, and a long list of enlightening workshops.
Esalen Institute. Perched on a rocky ledge overlooking the Pacific Ocean, this 140-acre institute in Big Sur is where Gestalt therapy guru Frederick “Fritz” Perls coached Rita Hayworth and where Ida Rolf pioneered Rolfing. Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, and Linus Pauling have all given workshops here.
The weathered redwood buildings and geodesic domes sprinkled about the grounds go back to the early 1960s, when Stanford graduate students Michael Murphy and Richard Price gave life to their vision of a sanctuary where thinkers of all stripes—philosophers, psychologists, artists, academics, spiritual leaders—could come together to pursue the “exploration of unrealized human capacities.”

Most of this work is unpublished, but for more on his approach, see David Alan Goodman, “Declare Your Independence,” Scientist 17 (12), June 16, 2003, p. 13.
27. Joel C. Robertson, Natural Prozac: Learning to Release Your Body’s Own Anti-Depressants (New York: HarperOne, 1998).
28. All quotes from Mark Filippi are from interviews I conducted with him in February and March 2012.
29. “Tensegrity” is a term used most famously by Buckminster Fuller to describe the structural integrity of various systems. See R. Buckminster Fuller, “Tensegrity,” 1961, at www.rwgrayprojects.com/rbfnotes/fpapers/tensegrity/tenseg01.html.
30. See http://Lifewaves.com or http://somaspace.org.
31. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead, 2010).
32. Kutcher Tweeted in defense of a fired college football coach, only learning later that the coach had covered up a child molestation.

They are put forth to manipulate, lull, or entice, to postpone action, to justify self-serving action, to gain or preserve power, or to deny an uncomfortable reality.
Lies distort the information stream. A system cannot function well if its information streams are corrupted by lies. One of the most important tenets of systems theory, for reasons we hope we have made clear in this book, is that information should not be distorted, delayed, or sequestered.
`All of humanity is in peril," said Buckminster Fuller, "if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth and all the truth, and to do so promptly-right now"5 Whenever you speak to anyone, on the street, at work, to a crowd, and especially to a child, you can endeavor to counter a lie or affirm a truth. You can deny the idea that having more things makes one a better person. You can question the notion that more for the rich will help the poor.

(3) Technology can be good for the environment.
My old biology teacher, Paul Ehrlich, has a formula declaring that environmental degradation is proportional to “population times affluence times technology.” It now appears that the coming of information technology is reversing that formula, so that better technology and more affluence leads to less environmental harm—if that is one of the goals of the society.
“Doing more with less”—Buckminster Fuller’s “ephemeralization”—is creating vastly more efficient industrial and agricultural processes, with proportionately less impact on natural systems. It is also moving ever more of human activity into an infosphere less harmfully entwined with the biosphere.
Given its roots, the Packard Foundation is particularly well suited to evaluate and foster what a Buddhist engineer might call right technology.

Because it was written, in the scriptures, by Gropius himself: “The fundamental pedagogical mistake of the academy arose from its preoccupation with the idea of individual genius.” Gropius’ and Mies’ byword was “team” effort. Gropius’ own firm in Cambridge was not called Walter Gropius & Associates, Inc., or anything close to it. It was called “The Architects Collaborative.” At Yale the students insisted on a group project, a collaborative design, to replace the obscene scramble for individual glory.
NOW, IN THE LATE 1940s AND EARLY 1950s , BUCKMINSTER Fuller came into his own. Fuller was an American designer with an endless stock of ingenious notions, one of which was his geodesic dome, a dome created of thousands of short, thin metal struts arranged in tetrahedra. Fuller’s dome fit in nicely with the modern principle of creating large structures with light surfaces out of machine-made materials and using tensions and stresses to do the work that massive supports had done for the old (bourgeois) order.

How do we build systems that truly make us free in cities? Sometimes it takes a radical shift in the urban imagination to point the way.
9. Mobilicities II
Freedom
Automobiles are in no way responsible for our traffic problems. The entire responsibility lies in the faulty roads, which are behind the times.
—Norman Bel Geddes, 1940
Possession is becoming progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete.
—Buckminster Fuller, 1969
In 1969 a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future. There was a lot of money to be made by whoever could divine the single technology most likely to capture the market in the coming decades. It was the era of James Bond gadgets and Apollo 11. Everyone was sure that some fabulous new machine would emerge to change everything.

New York: Houghton Mifflin.
2
Aesthetics
Bringing the Arts & Design into the Discussion of Transhumanism
Natasha Vita-More
“Transhumans want to elevate and extend life … let us choose to be transhumanist not only in our bodies, but also in our values … toward diversity, multiplicity … toward a more humane transhumanity …”1
Imagine a future designed by Frank Gehry that models elements of a “great logistic game” as conceived by Buckminster Fuller, within a monumental Christo installation, kinetically lit by James Turrell, scored by Philip Glass, and sung by Adele.
Introduction
The emergent course of technology is at once explicable and baffling. It has precipitated questions about a shifting human paradigm that remain unanswered by postmodernism. Considering the climate, discussions about speculative and emerging technologies need to include scientific realism and cosmic chance – a unity and plurality.

…

The most referred to methods for enhancement include regenerative medicine, nanomedicine, and brain preservation.
4 Primarily as suggested by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in “Cyborgs and Space” (1960) and tangentially as suggested by Donna Haraway in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Haraway 1990).
5 As suggested in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Smith and Morra 2007).
6 Primarily as understood by transhumanists as a stage of human transformation, succeeding transhuman, and tangentially as suggested in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Hayles 1999).
7 As understood by Randal Koene as “whole brain emulation” and more recently “substrate-independent minds.” http://www.kurzweilai.net/pattern-survival-versus-gene-survival.
8 Life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists (Vita-More 1997 [revised 2011]).
9 “Transcentury UPdate,” a cable public TV show aired in Los Angeles and Telluride, Colorado, from 1986 through 1993, and broadcast numerous segments on the political and ethical issues of technology and segments on building scenarios for the global distribution of technology (green energy etc.), the latter largely based on Buckminster Fuller’s distribution plan (Fuller 1982).
References
Ascott, Roy (1989) Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways Across the Whole Earth. Paper presented at annual Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria.
Broderick, Damien (1997) The White Abacus. New York: Avon Books.
Burgess, Lowry (2008) Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.cmu.edu/studio/fellowships/index.html.
Chislenko, Alexander “Sasha” (1996) “Intelligent Information Filters and Enhanced Reality.” http://penta.ufrgs.br/edu/telelab/10/enhanced.htm.

…

Avatars point out to us that enhancement is not merely a matter of increasing the ­effectiveness of a person in taking action, but also can mean an altered form of consciousness that expands opportunities for experiences, and escape from the conventional system of moral constraints. Especially noteworthy is the fact that one individual may have many different ­avatars, thereby becoming a multiplex or protean personality. Decades ago, psychiatrists described this as multiple personality neurosis or some form of split personality (Thigpen and Cleckley 1957; Lifton 1971), but in future we may decide that the most effective mode of being is ­pluralism. Buckminster Fuller (1970) used to say, “I seem to be a verb.” Perhaps today we should say, “I am a plural verb in future tense.”
Avatars and Simulation
Under the right conditions an avatar in a virtual world can substantially enhance the abilities of the user – the person who owns and operates it. Since ancient times, philosophers have debated the meaning of reality. Transhumanist philosophers have suggested varied viewpoints of ­simulation, consciousness, and existence, and notably argued whether humans could or do reside within a simulation (Moravec 1998; Bostrom 2003).

Other projects hope to harness the regular molecular structure of crystals as actual computing elements.
The Nanotube: A Variation of Buckyballs
Three professors—Richard Smalley and Robert Curl of Rice University, and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex—shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their 1985 discovery of soccer-ball-shaped molecules formed of a large number of carbon atoms. Organized in hexagonal and pentagonal patterns like R. Buckminster Fuller’s building designs, they were dubbed “buckyballs.” These unusual molecules, which form naturally in the hot fumes of a furnace, are extremely strong—ahundred times stronger than steel—a property they share with Fuller’s architectural innovations.12
More recently, Dr. Sumio lijima of Nippon Electric Company showed that in addition to the spherical buckyballs, the vapor from carbon arc lamps also contained elongated carbon molecules that looked like long tubes.13 Called nanotubes because of their extremely small size—fifty thousand of them side by side would equal the thickness of one human hair—they are formed of the same pentagonal patterns of carbon atoms as buckyballs and share the buckyball’s unusual strength.

…

BRUTUS.1 A computer program that creates fictional stories with a theme of betrayal; invented by Selmer Bringsjord, Dave Ferucci, and a team of software engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Buckyball A soccer-ball-shaped molecule formed of a large number of carbon atoms.
Because of their hexagonal and pentagonal shape, the molecules were dubbed “buckyballs” in reference to R. Buckminster Fuller’s building designs.
Busy beaver One example of a class of noncomputational functions; an unsolvable problem in mathematics. Being a “Turing machine unsolvable problem,” the busy beaver function cannot be computed by a Turing machine. To compute busy beaver of n, one creates all the n-state Turing machines that do not write an infinite number of Is on their tape. The largest number of Is written by the Turing machine in this set that writes the largest number of Is is busy beaver of n.

City planners—and the common run of human beings, for that matter—had thought of cities in that way for years. They hadn’t always realized the implications of that thought, of course; that was why so many cityscapes from about 1920 showed tall, skinny skyscrapers dominating the scene—that was so everyone could have an outside window, or something like it, and so the city could breathe. But that was before air-conditioning. That was before Buckminster Fuller, reasoning from energy considerations, declared the skyscraper a disaster. If you wanted, said Fuller, to design a nearly perfect radiator—which was to say, a system that would waste as much energy as it possibly could—you would come up with something very like the skyline of almost any city in the world. Especially New York, for it had started the fashion; but everywhere else, too, as rapidly as the others could catch up.

…

What does a bear do to keep from being frozen or boiled?
The bear has two strategies. Clothe itself in fur; dig into a cave in winter.
The same strategies were open to City-Bear, and Brandon knew where to find out about them. He pulled out the Feigerman & Tisdale report and studied it. Yes. His memory had been correct; the strategies were there. City-Bear could enclose itself, like the fur of an animal, in a thermally opaque coat—as Buckminster Fuller proposed, a great dome over the city. Or City-Bear could bury itself in a deep cave, where the worst winter winds could not follow. Below the ground the temperature is steady and bearable all year round—thus the art of “terratecture,” to take advantage of this free gift.
Not entirely free, Brandon discovered. Cities do not need only to be protected from outside heat. They generate heat of their own—from industry, from home heating, from their vehicles—and that was why New York City was generally a degree or two warmer than its neighbors in winter, and why landlocked interior cities like Saint Louis left the “footprint” of that extra warmth in altered precipitation patterns that could be measured for many miles downwind.

What was emerging was a greatly expanded notion
of the role of citizen not just as a passive consumer of political
information and occasional voter, but as an active player,
monitoring what government and politicians were doing,
demanding a seat at the table and a view of the proceedings,
sharing self-generated news of what was important, and
participating in problem solving.
The back-channel was coming to the foreground. The
modern transparency movement was about to take oﬀ.
48
MICAH L. SIFRY
3
From Scarcity to Abundance
You never change things by ﬁghting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model
obsolete.
––R. Buckminster Fuller
The fundamental change powering the networked age of
politics is the shift from scarcity to abundance. Thanks to
the rapid evolution of computer processing power, all kinds
of goods that were once expensive to produce have become
cheap. Beyond the declining price of a personal computer
or a backup drive, elemental changes in the economics of
information, connectivity, and time have occurred:
y Information: The cost of making an electronic copy
of any kind of data and sharing it with others has
dropped to almost zero.

., Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley …
Who fought each other …
And the world …
To discover and build …
New molecules …
Out of the world’s most studied element …
Carbon.4
Before 1985, no one knew …
That you could lattice carbon …
To build geodesic molecules (which look like soccer balls)…
On a nano scale.
The structure of these compounds resembles the domes that a famous architect …
Named R. Buckminster Fuller …
Used to design …
So they are called fullerenes …
And may be the key to building nano scale …
Medicine transporters …
Super-strong tubes …
Transistors.5
In February 2000, IBM scientists announced that they were starting to think about designing a computer on a molecular scale …
A computer that could float through the air.
A seemingly crazy idea until you realize that ENIAC …
The first all-electronic digital computer (1946) …
Weighed thirty tons and was 100 feet long …
But was far less powerful than the chip in your PC, which can fit on your fingertip.

The Dream Home follows in the steps of Tomorrowland’s original utopian domicile, the Monsanto House of the Future, sponsored by that corporation’s division of plastics, before the very word became an ironic joke. Opened in 1957, it was meant to represent a home in 1986. The Monsanto House featured such theretofore unheard-of marvels as a microwave, an ultrasonic dishwasher that rose from beneath the counter, closed-circuit-TV intercoms, and an electric razor. Old footage shows that it really was a wonder. A gorgeous building with walls of plastic windows, perched atop a central post, echoing Buckminster Fuller’s visionary Dymaxion House. The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic futuristic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the mid-century grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing.
Contemporary accounts of the advent of electricity on the domestic front almost always make mention of a horrified realization of the kinds of filth people lived with before they could see it properly illuminated.

The outsized volume was divided into several sections: “Whole Earth Systems” stood out at the front, followed by “Shelter and Land Use”, “Industry and Craft”, “Communications”, “Community”, “Nomadics” and “Learning”. Interspersed throughout the catalogue, but particularly in the front section, lie texts about computer science, informatics, brain research and cybernetics. A two-page spread is given over to the works of Buckminster Fuller. The September 1966 edition of Scientific American, subtitled simply “Information”, is touted as “the best introduction we’ve seen to computer science”. Opposite it sits a gushing review of the HP 9100A Calculator, “the best of the new tabletop number-crunchers”. On the previous page sits a review of The Human Biocomputer, an exploration into psychedelics and sensory deprivation by the neuroscientist John Lily, inventor of the flotation tank.

(We lived in a very sophisticated part of Manhattan, so we saw more foreign movies than American.) I avidly studied the details of my comic books, from the language and visual angles to the dots of the color. And I listened to radio programs with every fiber of my brain.
I had four main media heroes in my first 10 years, and they are my heroes now: Walt Disney, Leonardo da Vinci, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Buckminster Fuller. They worked in different media, but in much the same way. Each was independent, visionary and original. All these years I have tried to be like them: independent, able to see what others could not, and creating new designs others could not imagine.
I also learned a lot about show business; I happened to have inside connections. I rarely saw my parents, who were divorced when I was born, but I learned a lot when I saw them.

The robot uses smart software to tell what’s edible and what’s not and uses a laser-guided robotic arm to grab the biomass and put it in a hopper that connects with an internal combustion engine, which in turn powers an onboard battery. Why do this? The answer is partly that wars depend on energy (soldiers increasingly rely on battery-powered devices) and partly that wars are often fought in remote regions where supply chains can be easily disrupted.
“Either war is obsolete or men are.”
Buckminster Fuller, author, inventor and futurist
Friend or foe? When it comes to drones, or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), these are principally surveillance tools not weapons at present. Payloads are generally small and they’re vulnerable to ground defense because of their slow speed. But give it a few decades and things will change. For example, how about networked drones small enough and responsive enough to enter a house through an open window and transmit information as they travel from room to room?

Some think it could be less than a decade, others are convinced it is centuries away. One thing that is clear, though, is that the belief that AGI could arrive within a few decades is not the preserve of a few crackpots. Sober and very experienced scientists think so too. It is a possibility we should take seriously.
Creating an AGI is very hard. But serious consideration of exponential growth makes very hard problems seem more tractable. Buckminster Fuller estimated that at the start of the twentieth century the sum of human knowledge was doubling every century, and that by the end of the second world war that had reduced to twenty-five years. (40) Now it takes 13 months and in 2006 IBM estimated that when the internet of things becomes a reality the rate would be every 12 hours. (41)
The football stadium thought experiment illustrates how progress at exponential rate can take you by surprise – even when you are looking for it.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by
Roger L. Martin

They focus your attention and clarify your thinking.” 13 Rather than an enemy, constraints are features that make the task at hand more exciting, the problem more wicked, and the status for releasing the constraint that much loftier. Constraints point the validity-oriented design thinker to the locus of needed innovation. They frame the mystery that needs to be solved. Instead of telling us what we cannot do, constraints help us reframe the problem and discover new opportunities in the process.
Buckminster Fuller is a hero to designers because he was inspired, not discouraged, by a seemingly intractable physical constraint: buildings get proportionally heavier, weaker, and more expensive as they grow larger in scale. The problem inspired him to make a logical leap to a structure that becomes proportionally lighter, stronger, and less expensive as it grows larger in scale—the geodesic dome.
The Revolt of the Analyticals: Obstacles to Change
Leaders who undertake a thorough overhaul of their organizations’ structures, processes, and cultural norms should expect resistance.

As in desperate times of yesteryear, the dispossessed are coming up with imaginative ways—some legal, others not so much—to address the crisis of poverty while still attempting to hold the government accountable for the safety and well-being of its citizenry. Their voices, methods of survival and imaginations are crucial in shaping their—and our—destiny.
REMAKING AMERICA
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model
that makes the existing model obsolete.”
—R. Buckminster Fuller
Since business leaders have prioritized the path to profit at all costs and opted to transport American jobs overseas, we have no choice but to explore other ways to create jobs in our own communities and insist that the government create immediate job opportunities for all categories of the “poor.”
MacArthur Genius Grant winner and host of the public radio program The Promised Land, Majora Carter, shared her unique perspective during our symposium:
“We’re not going to abolish capitalism tomorrow.

The Shulgins wrote the preface to Stolaroff’s book Thanatos to Eros (1994) detailing his experiences with LSD, MDMA, mescaline and a number of Shulgin’s creations.2
Author Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ in 1984, was responsible for filming the Mother of All Demos, and that same year he launched the Whole Earth Catalog, the ad-free samizdat techno-hippy bible. Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech. It now reads much like a printed blog; it was a paper website, in the words of blogger and author Kevin Kelly, that was sprinting before the web even took its first shaky steps.3 Its statement of intent in its launch issue reads like a manifesto that has been realized by today’s web users: ‘A realm of intimate personal power is developing – the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.

“Within ten years after initiating space migration,” Leary wrote, “a group of a thousand people will be able to get together cooperatively and build a new mini-world cheaper than they could buy individual homes down here. When you’ve got new ideas you can’t hang around the old hive.”
During the seventies, Leary had plenty of company in calling for the establishment of elite experimental colonies beyond the bounds of established society. Buckminster Fuller, Gerard O’Neill, and Jerry Brown, among others, argued for the necessity of expanding the American frontier to create zones of technological and social experimentation where innovation could proceed unhampered by outdated laws and traditions. The migration of the self-selecting elite would eventually help the more timid who chose to stay behind, Leary argued, as it “allows for new experiments—technological, political, and social—in a new ecological niche far from the home hive.”

pages: 403words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by
Kate Raworth

No other academic discipline has managed to provoke its own students – the very people who have chosen to dedicate years of their life to studying its theories – into worldwide revolt. Their rebellion has made one thing clear: the revolution in economics has indeed begun. Its success depends not only on debunking the old ideas but, more importantly, on bringing forth the new. As the ingenious twentieth-century inventor Buckminster Fuller once said, ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’
This book takes up his challenge, setting out seven mind-shifting ways in which we can all learn to think like twenty-first-century economists. By revealing the old ideas that have entrapped us and replacing them with new ones to inspire us, it proposes a new economic story that is told in pictures as much as in words.

pages: 313words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
by
Colin Ellard

The Design Hub at Melbourne’s Royal Institute of Technology is composed of thousands of polished disks that rotate to follow the sun, lowering the energy costs of the building, and one day serving as a power plant using an array of photovoltaic cells. Similarly, Chicago architect Tristran D’Estree Sterk designs shape-shifting buildings whose organically curved and pleasing outer envelopes use the principles of what Buckminster Fuller called “tensegrity”’ to alter their very form in response to readouts from sensors. So far, these sensors are designed to measure things like air temperature and sunshine, with the main goal of producing a pleasant internal atmosphere with the minimum of energy expenditure. Although such structures certainly take advantage of modern sensing gear and materials to produce accommodations that make for greener buildings, they are really only a small step beyond the simple feedback mechanism of a thermostat on the furnace of a house.

The sooner we make a real commitment, the better, because there will be no deus ex machina to bail us out. Token funding of alternative energies won’t be enough. Our whole national mindset has to change.
It would have been nice, of course, if the big push to develop alternative energies had been made before we reached this pass. Even before the first Arab oil embargo it was clear to some people that it made no sense to rely so heavily on fossil fuels. Buckminster Fuller was an early visionary in this area, as in many others. In 1969 he wrote in his book Utopia or Oblivion: “There are gargantuan energy-income sources available which do not stay the processes of nature’s own conservation of energy within the earth crust ‘against a rainy day.’ These are in water, tidal, wind, and desert-impinging sun radiation power. The exploiters of fossil fuels, coal and oil, say it costs less to produce and burn the savings account.

The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by The Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”13
The Homebrew Computer Club, where Jobs and Wozniak brain-stormed the first Apple computer, was founded on these principles. Today it carries on in hundreds of makerspaces, each using twenty-first-century tools to try to effect the same sort of revolutionary social and economic change.
Real countries make stuff
Any country, if it wants to stay strong, must have a manufacturing base.

Deserving Mention
Canadian Royalty Trusts, oil and gas income trusts, can experience a major rally as energy prices recover. In the meantime the yields remain attractive for the time being. Baytex Energy Trust, BTE; Enerplus Resources Fund Trust, ERF; Penn West Energy Trust, PWE.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Real Things
Can’t Live Without ’Em
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.
—Ecclesiastes 1:4
Wealth is the progressive mastery of matter by mind.
—Buckminster Fuller
Agriculture
When investment legend and commodities bull Jim Rogers says that ten years from now instead of twenty-nine-year-old stockbrokers driving Maseratis, it will be twenty-nine-year-old farmers, he’s making an important point about the shifting economy. People’s spending hierarchies experience dynamic changes in lean economic times. People can live without the excesses of Wall Street.

For example, molecules of naphthalene (the substance that mothballs are made of) are also made of carbon with hydrogen attached, this time in two loops.
Carbon chemistry is rather like the toy construction kit called Tinkertoy. In the laboratory, chemists have succeeded in making carbon atoms join up with each other, not just in simple loops but in wonderfully shaped Tinkertoy-like molecules nicknamed Buckyballs and Buckytubes. ‘Bucky’ was the nickname of Buckminster Fuller, the great American architect who invented the geodesic dome. The Buckyballs and Buckytubes scientists have made are artificial molecules. But they show the Tinkertoyish way in which carbon atoms can be joined together into scaffolding-like structures that can be indefinitely large. (Just recently the exciting news was announced that Buckyballs have been detected in outer space, in the dust drifting near to a distant star.)

We know the gateways link to at least three other planets. There may be many that we don’t know of. We don’t know how to create them or close them; all we can do is send people through, or pile bricks in the opening.” He nearly bites his tongue, because there are more than three worlds out there, and he’s been to at least one of them: the bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built by the NRO from their secret budget. He’s seen the mile-high dome Buckminster Fuller spent his last decade designing for them, the rings of Patriot air defense missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped fighters from the Skunk Works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols the empty skies of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and apartment blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families and thousands of support personnel. In event of war they’ll be evacuated through the small gate that has been moved to the Executive Office Building basement, in a room beneath the swimming pool where Jack used to go skinny-dipping with Marilyn.

In this sense our world becomes one, where everything is information, where knowledge is converted into actual objects and where the internet crosses the chasm from the virtual into the physical.
A virtual physical reality
While technology has already been used extensively in the fields of dentistry, medicine, automobiles and aviation, it’s now entering our homes for the first time. Famed designer, inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller spoke of a future where technology would advance to a point where we could do ‘more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing’. Fuller spoke of this phenomenon in 1938 and coined the term ‘ephermalization’ to describe it.
Fuller’s vision was that ephermalization would result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources.

Stay Humble— Stay a Learner
Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring- out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises. Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know.
The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. In a world of complex systems, it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading.

pages: 260words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
by
William Poundstone

That’s the space occupied by the cannonballs or oranges, as a fraction of total space. Kepler guessed this was the densest packing possible, but he was unable to supply a proof.
Kepler’s conjecture, as it was called, remained a great unsolved problem for centuries. In 1900 it made David Hilbert’s famous list of twenty-three unsolved problems in mathematics. A number of people have claimed to prove it, including the architect Buckminster Fuller, of geodesic dome fame. All such resolutions were quickly rejected as wrong until 1998, when Thomas Hales offered a complicated, computer-assisted proof showing that Kepler was right. Most believe his result will stand up, though the construction of a formal proof is currently ongoing. Hales estimated it would take another twenty years.
I assumed above that each golf ball effectively rests in an imaginary Lucite cube whose edges equal the ball’s diameter.

It was Stewart Brand who suggested that Lama might provide an atmosphere, as John Markoff wrote, “to create a meeting of the minds between the NLS researchers and the counterculture community animated by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The land outside Taos was full of alternative communities—Morningstar East, Reality Construction Company, the Hog Farm, New Buffalo, and the Family, to name a few. Steve Durkee and Steve Baer, both disciples of Buckminster Fuller and close friends of Stewart Brand, ran Lama, and the architecture of the buildings hewed closely to Bucky Fuller’s geodesic dome design.
Fuller believed that what society needed was not more specialization but a new type of generalist, whom he called a comprehensive designer. For Bucky the problem of humanity’s survival was one of design, and he thought the “artist-scientist” could solve it:
If man is to continue as a successful pattern-complex function in universal evolution, it will be because the next decades will have witnessed the artist-scientist’s seizure of the prime design responsibility and his successful conversion of tool-augmented man from killingry to advanced livingry—adequate for all humanity.

He introduced me to Total Immersion swimming by Terry Laughlin, and in less than 10 days of solo training, I went from a 2-length maximum (of a 25-yard pool) to swimming more than 40 lengths per workout in sets of 2 and 4. It blew my mind, and now I swim for fun.
Chris is one of the people who generously mentored me in the startup investing game. The other majors include Naval Ravikant (page 546), Kevin Rose (page 340), and Mike Maples, who got me started (see the Real-World MBA on page 250).
Chris mentioned several books when he appeared on my podcast, including I Seem to Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller. 48 hours later, used copies were selling for $999 on Amazon.
Are You Playing Offense or Defense?
Despite the fact that people refer to Chris as a “Silicon Valley investor,” he hasn’t lived in San Francisco since 2007. Instead, he bought a cabin in rural Truckee, Tahoe’s less-expensive neighbor, and moved to prime skiing and hiking country. It is no tech hotbed. Back then, Chris hadn’t yet made real money in the investing game, but he had a rationale for buying the getaway:
“I wanted to go on offense.

…

MacDonald), At Home: A Short History of Private Life; The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (Bill Bryson), A Curious Discovery: An Entrepreneur’s Story (John Hendricks)
Rubin, Rick: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell), Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn)
Sacca, Chris: Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived (Laurence Shames and Peter Barton), The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All; The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert (Richard Betts), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel (Mohsin Hamid), I Seem to Be a Verb (R. Buckminster Fuller)
Schwarzenegger, Arnold: The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Boris Johnson), Free to Choose (Milton Friedman), California (Kevin Starr)
Sethi, Ramit: Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson), The Social Animal (Elliot Aronson), Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got (Jay Abraham), Mindless Eating (Brian Wansink), The Robert Collier Letter Book (Robert Collier), Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Keith Ferrazzi), What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School (Mark H.

It occurred at a range of extramural and sometimes transient social settings, including various homes, Kepler’s bookstore (a place reminiscent of the bookshops and coffeehouses of Restoration London), and a Free University that offered courses on “How to End the IBM Monopoly.” In print, there was of course Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a guide to “tools” useful for readers impatient with the conformities of American consumerism. Launched in 1969, the catalogue touched on an extraordinary range of topics, from cybernetics and communication theories to agriculture and medicine, with an eclectic individualism purportedly inspired by Buckminster Fuller. It grew with successive editions until by 1971 it was almost 450 pages long. Its influence was demonstrated by the People’s Computer Company, a project overseen by Brand and Robert Albrecht (whom Ted Nelson hailed as the “caliph of counterculture computerdom”). The PCC was both a publication and an institution. As a publication, it was produced on the same printing equipment as the Whole Earth Catalog, using similar pagecraft to proselytize for a cognate message.

In 1978, Daniel Boorstin, one of the most famous American historians of the twentieth century, lauded television’s power to “disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world—democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America.” Boorstin wrote these words when many political scientists and policymakers were still awaiting the triumph of “teledemocracy,” in which citizens would use television to not only observe but also directly participate in politics. (The hope that new technology could enable more public participation in politics predates television; back in 1940 Buckminster Fuller, the controversial American inventor and architect, was already lauding the virtues of “telephone democracy,” which could enable “voting by telephone on all prominent questions before Congress.”)
In hindsight, the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was closer to the truth in 1953 than Boorstin ever was in 1978. “The television,” wrote Bradbury, “is that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”

His days of deal making on the ground floor of the Esperson Building were over. Mitchell Energy was a substantial company—not a giant like Mobil or Amoco, but a respectably sized independent oil and gas explorer. Having pulled himself up from poverty to wealth, Mitchell’s focus began to meander. In the early 1970s, he attended a think-tank retreat in the Rocky Mountains, where he met and fell under the sway of Buckminster Fuller, the futurist and inventor. Fuller, an iconic figure at the time, popularized the term “Spaceship Earth.” The Earth’s resources, he argued, were limited and needed to be used wisely, not frittered away. Fuller first spurred Mitchell’s interest in growth and depletion. At the end of a few days spent with Fuller talking about global overpopulation and environmental catastrophes, the futurist asked the oilman, “What are you going to do about it?”

Brand is best known for founding the famous Whole Earth Catalog, a publication that itself became an emblem and icon of California’s late 1960s counterculture and back-to-the-land movement.
One afternoon, probably in March 1966 in the hills of San Francisco, Brand dropped a bit of LSD and went up on a roof overlooking the city. It was a form of escape. He sat in a blanket, shivering in the cold spring air, overlooking the hills, lost in enhanced thought:
And so I’m watching the buildings, looking out at San Francisco, thinking of Buckminster Fuller’s notion that people think of the earth’s resources as unlimited because they think of the earth as flat. I’m looking at San Francisco from 300 feet and 200 micrograms up and thinking that I can see from here that the earth is curved. I had the idea that the higher you go the more you can see earth as round.29
Yet no photograph of the whole Earth was publicly available at the time, Brand thought, despite nearly ten years of US space exploration in a Cold War arms race that extended even beyond the planet.

The “nine to five till you’re sixty-five” pattern, so recent in human history but so pervasive today, seems like the only choice for someone who is neither a sports nor entertainment superstar nor an eccentric. After all, there are bills to pay and an identity to maintain, and besides, what would I do with my life if I didn’t have a job?
Is More Better?
And many of us are out there “making a dying” because we’ve bought the pervasive consumer myth that more is better. Even though Buck-minsterFuller likened the earth to a spaceship, we cling to the silver-screen images of the Frontier, where “there’s always more where that came from.”
We build our working lives on this myth of more. Our expectation is to make more money as the years go on. We will get more responsibility and more perks as we move up in our field. Eventually, we hope, we will have more possessions, more prestige and more respect from our community.

…

Rather than climbing a career ladder, you will be following the promptings of your heart and mind—and may find yourself on some side roads that are more interesting and enjoyable than any “job” you could have ever imagined.
Life After the Crossover Point
The essence of FI is choice. Once you’ve passed the Crossover Point you have choice about how you fill the hours of your day and the days of your productive life.
There is no formula for how you live after the Crossover Point. And that’s the point. You are free to invent your life. You are free to explore what Buck-minsterFuller meant when he said, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” You have a choice.
SUMMARY OF STEP 8
Each month apply the following equation to your total accumulated capital and post the monthly investment income as a separate line on your Wall Chart:
When you begin investing your money according to the guidelines offered in the next chapter, start entering your actual interest income for your monthly investment income on your Wall Chart (while still applying the formula to your further savings).

It’s long been known that one form of pure carbon (graphite) can be turned into another (diamond) by heat and pressure. But the Bayreuth team used neither. They used a third form of pure carbon, fullerite, also known as buckminsterfullerene or ‘buckyballs’. Its sixty carbon atoms form a molecule shaped like a soccer ball, or like one of the geodesic domes invented by the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983).
The carbon atoms in diamond are arranged in cubes stacked in pyramids; the new substance is made of tiny, interlocking rods. These are called ‘nanorods’ because they are so small – nanos is Greek for ‘dwarf’. Each is 1 micron (one millionth of a metre) long and 20 nanometres (20 billionths of a metre) wide – about 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair.
Subjecting fullerite to extremes of heat (2,220 °C) and compression (200,000 times normal atmospheric pressure) created not only the hardest, but also the stiffest and densest substance known to science.

The football is, therefore, theoretically a pattern into which carbon atoms might spontaneously fall.
Mirabile dictu, exactly this pattern has been discovered among carbon atoms. The team responsible, including Sir Harry Kroto of Sussex University, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Called Buckminsterfullerene, it is an elegant sphere of 60 carbon atoms, linked up as 20 hexagons interspersed with 12 pentagons. The name honours the visionary American architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I was privileged to meet when he was a very old man2) and the spheres are affectionately known as buckyballs. They can combine together to make larger crystals. Like graphite sheets, buckyballs make good lubricants, probably because of their spherical shape: they presumably work like tiny ball bearings.
Since the buckyball’s discovery, chemists have realized that it is just a special case of a large family of ‘buckytubes’ and other ‘fullerenes’.

For me, the champions of all microscopic kaleidoscopes are the Radiolaria, another planktonic group to which Haeckel paid special attention (Figure 7.5). They too illustrate beautiful symmetries of various orders, equivalent to kaleidoscopes with two, three, four, five, six and more mirrors. They have tiny skeletons made of chalk with a beauty and elegance that has kaleidoscopic embryology written all over it.
The kaleidoscopic masterpiece in Figure 7.6 might have been designed by the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I was once privileged to hear, in his nineties, lecturing for a mesmerizing three hours without respite). Like his geodesic domes it relies for its strength on the structurally robust geometric form of the triangle. It is clearly the product of a kaleidoscopic embryology of a high order. Any given mutation will be reflected a very large number of times. The exact number cannot be determined from this picture.

While the wheelbarrow clearly had an advantage over the hod in requiring only one person to transport it, the hod retained an advantage over the wheelbarrow when it came to being emptied onto an elevated work space. Such relative advantages and disadvantages among artifacts lead to diversity rather than extinction. (photo credit 13.4)
Streamlining American automobiles began with some subtle changes introduced in the 1920s, but the solidly established squarish Fords set the aesthetic standard. Radical streamlining, such as introduced by Buckminster Fuller in his Dymaxion car exhibited in 1935 at the Chicago World’s Fair, was clearly “futuristic,” and hence not taken as seriously as cars of the present. The sensibly streamlined 1934 Chrysler Airflow rounded and tapered the boxy profile, fenders, and windows of contemporary designs, but it was not a commercial success. The immediate postwar period, which the atomic bomb, if nothing else, defined as the future realized, saw the arrival of truly streamlined cars in the 1947 Studebaker.

In the span of a few years, his mad-hatter effusions drew followers to him from a wide array of disciplines and professions. As the recipient of a prestigious Albert Schweitzer fellowship at New York’s Fordham University, he entered the American mainstream, where he alienated, befriended, or otherwise unsettled an impressive assortment of American cultural leaders, from Woody Allen, John Cage, Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, Abbie Hoffman, and William Jovanovich to Alan Kay, Stanley Kubrick, Timothy Leary, Victor Papanek, Ezra Pound, Carl Sagan, Tom Wolfe, and Andy Warhol.
By mid-century, McLuhan had become a recognized critic of advertising, like Vance Packard before him. McLuhan also had a ready explanation for Packard’s popularity in criticizing the excesses of advertising. He felt that Packard as a social phenomenon had been made possible by the leveling effect of television, which allowed Packard to “hoot at the old salesmen . . . just as MAD [magazine] does.”66 The lively prose of a passage that slams General Motors and its ad agencies because they did not “know, or even suspect, anything about the effect of the TV image on the users of motorcars” is probably the best clue we still have to McLuhan’s charismatic attraction.

Residents desiring views of the surrounding countryside would be able to opt for (presumably costlier) dwellings situated along the perimeter, facing out. Stores, schools, factories, and other nonresidential uses would be concentrated, mall-style, in the central core. Individual heating and air-conditioning units would be unnecessary because the city itself would be climate-controlled. The domed roof would be made of triangular glass panels and would owe a design debt to R. Buckminster Fuller. “Most houses in Compact City would have two floors in order to conserve base area,” the authors wrote, with the self-assurance of professionally logical men who are certain they have thought of everything (Dantzig was an inventor of linear programming). “Design of both the interior and exterior of these houses would vary according to the preferences of the residents. The ringway would provide access to the rear of the upper floor of a house.

The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Brand’s own information wanted to be expensive, and he made a small fortune in the publishing business. A bohemian intellectual who befriended both Buckminster Fuller and Ken Kesey, Brand appeared as a character in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and campaigned for NASA to release a picture of Earth from space. As living off the land became part of the post-hippie zeitgeist, he created the Whole Earth Catalog, an influential compendium of advice that Steve Jobs once referred to as “sort of like Google in paperback form.”19 He started out peddling an early version from the back of his truck and went on to sell more than a million copies of a later edition.

Another comes from the French fox Voltaire: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Every interview with a public figure should include the question “What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?” The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. Let me quickly furnish a partial list of things I’ve been wrong about in public. In the 1960s, I pushed communes as a path to the future, Buckminster Fuller domes as habitable, and cocaine as harmless. In the 1970s, I was sure the 1973 oil crisis would lead to police in the streets of the United States, that nuclear power was bad, and that small was always beautiful, villages especially. I was totally wrong about the Y2K bug in 2000. In 2003 I was so sure that a Democrat would win the 2004 presidential election that I made a public bet about it.

In the tapestry gallery, among the complicated wall hangings, there was a bulletin screen filled with messages and games and jokes. I stopped before it, and a sentence struck my eye. “Only under the stresses of total social emergencies do the effectively adequate alternative technical strategies synergetically emerge.” Jeez, I thought, what prose artist penned that? I looked down — the ascription was to one Buckminster Fuller. The quote continued: “Here we witness mind over matter and humanity’s escape from the limitations of his identity with some circumscribed geographical locality.” That was for sure.
Part of the bulletin screen was reserved for suggestions for the name of the starship. Anyone could pick his color and typeface, and tap a name onto the space on the screen. It was getting crowded. Most of them were dull: First, One, The Starship.

I can just peep over the ridge, which falls away abruptly in front of me. More dead tree stumps; the ground beneath me, the crunching--now I can see that it's grass, freeze-dried and mummified beneath a layer of carbon dioxide frost. Hills or low mounds of some kind rise in the near distance, and then- "Disneyland?" I hear myself saying.
Alan laughs quietly. "Not Disneyland. Think Mad King Ludwig's last commission, as executed by Buckminster Fuller." Cheesecake crenellations, battlements with machicolations, moat and drawbridge and turrets. Spiky pointed roofs on the towers--like the police stations in West Belfast, designed to deflect incoming mortar fire. Arrow slots filled with mirror glass half a metre thick. Radomes and antenna masts in the courtyard where you'd expect armoured knights to mount up.
"I didn't know the RUC were Cthulhu-worshippers."

The tragic contradictions of Gruen’s life run through the plan for EPCOT as well: watching Disney’s film, you catch a fleeting glimpse of an alternate version of the recent past, where the pedestrian mall—“more like downtown than downtown itself”—inspires a new vision of urban life that rejects the tyranny of the automobile and ushers in a new era of mass-transit innovation. (Just imagine the impact on climate change if we’d had thirty years of using our automobiles only for weekend pleasure trips.) But, of course, that alternate past didn’t happen. Instead, the mall triggered decades of suburban ascendancy, and the Walt Disney Corporation turned EPCOT into yet another theme park, with its bizarre and sad hybrid of Buckminster Fuller futurism and It’s-a-Small-World globalism.
Why weren’t progress cities built? The easiest way to dismiss the Gruen/EPCOT vision is to focus on the centrality of the mall itself. Now that mall culture is in decline—in the United States and Europe at least—we understand that the overly programmed nature of the mall environment ended up being its fatal flaw. As always, play is driven by surprise and novelty, just as it was when those London ladies first encountered the lavish shopfronts of Ludgate Hill, or when the Parisian kleptomaniacs first wandered into the wonderland of Le Bon Marché.

Contents
Introduction
"When I'm working on a problem,
about beauty.
I never think
I think only how to solve the problem.
But when I have finished,
if the solution
is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
—
R.
BUCKMINSTER
FULLER
1
•
Do y o u remember the exact m o m e n t you first became interested
in personal development? I certainly do. It happened in January 1991
while I was sitting in a jail cell. I'd just been arrested for felony grand
theft. This wasn't my first run-in with the law, so I knew was in trouble.
I was 19 years old.
I began stealing shortly after moving to Berkeley, California, during my first semester at UC Berkeley. I didn't steal for money or to
build a reputation—I stole for the thrill. I was addicted to the surge
of adrenaline. The compulsion to steal was so strong that shoplifting
was part of my routine, nothing more than my daily espresso.

Unlike Alexander Parker’s pastoralized plaza, Cityscape offered an extremely inventive and even playful rendition of 42nd Street’s character, adapting its identity as a rialto of popular entertainment to a new culture and new technology. Weinstein hired the artists and designers who had created the celebrated Czech pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, including Milos For-man, as well as the design firm of Chermayeff & Geismar, which was responsible for the American pavilion—the one with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome—and the accompanying exhibit at Osaka in 1970. Cityscape was not a preservation project: its premise was that 42nd Street needed to be projected forward rather than backward.
The design firm produced a cutaway aerial view of the project which today has about it a Flash Gordon sense of the fantastical. A monorail runs all around the perimeter on an upper floor—the orientation ride.

Lights, movies, video tapes, video tapes of themselves, flashing and swirling over the dome from the beams of searchlights rising from the floor from between their bodies. The sounds roiling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present, tapes and humanoid sounds of the future—but all brought together now—here and now— Kairos—into the dilated cerebral cortex ...
The geodesic dome, of course, was Buckminster Fuller's inspiration. The light projections were chiefly Gerd Stern's, Gerd Stern of the USCO group, although Roy Seburn had already done a lot with them and Page Browning showed a talent that surprised everybody. But the magic dome, the new planet, was Kesey and the Pranksters. The idea went beyond what would later be known as mixed-media entertainment, now a standard practice in "psychedelic discotheques" and so forth.

President Jack Shewmaker, a major force in pushing the digital revolution in Bentonville,
even attended the same church as Holder.33
These creative collusions between business, technology, and belief
shed new light on the supposed “paradox” of Wal-Mart: how the hightech rednecks mastered cybernetics and corporate culture without losing Christ or country music. Despite its gleam of pure sciÂ�enÂ�tific rationality, developing and deploying high technology has been in part a
132
MAKING CHRISTIAN BUSIN E S S M EN
spiritual exercise from the beginning, no matter the political context.
The countercultural devotees of Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, and the
Whole Earth Catalog brought their dreams of antiauthoritarian, transcendent elitism into the cyber revolution in California. Blending their
privileged vision as “comprehensive designers” with the decentralized
technologies they developed, this loose fraternity marked an entire wing
of the postindustrial economy with their conviction that their new tools
made them “as gods.”

He knew what hyperdiamond was: a topologically complex interweave of tubular fullerene; structurally similar to cellulose or bulk chitin but thousands of times stronger; its rigidity artificially maintained by some piezo-electric trick which Gilgamesh lacked.
"Interesting," Vargovic said. "But unfortunately not interesting enough."
She ordered another mocha and downed it replying. "Use your imagination. Only the Demarchy knows how to synthesise it."
"It's also useless as a weapon."
"Depends. There's an application you should know about."
"What?"
"Keeping this city afloat - and I'm not talking about economic solvency. Do you know about Buckminster Fuller? He lived about four hundred years ago; believed absolute democracy could be achieved through technological means."
"The fool."
"Maybe. But Fuller also invented the geodesic lattice which determines the structure of the buckyball; the closed allotrope of tubular fullerene. The city owes him on two counts."
"Save the lecture. How does the hyperdiamond come into it?"
"Flotation bubbles," she said.

May it help many readers gather inspiration to create businesses, schools, hospitals, or nonprofits inspired by this emerging new wave of consciousness that is starting to transform the world.
Ken Wilber
Denver, Colorado
Fall 2013
Introduction
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Richard Buckminster Fuller
Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and scientist, proclaimed in a treatise written in 350 BC that women have fewer teeth than men.1 Today we know this is nonsense. But for almost 2,000 years, it was accepted wisdom in the Western World. Then one day, someone had the most revolutionary of ideas: let’s count!
The scientific method—formulating a hypothesis and then testing it—is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we find it hard to conceive that intelligent people would blindly trust authority and not put assumptions to the test.

For Oakeshott, the cookbook was the end (or an output), not the start (or an input), of that tradition. An argument against rationalists who refused to acknowledge the importance of practices and traditions, rather than a celebration of cookery books, it’s a surprisingly upbeat moment in Oakeshott’s thought. However, one can only wonder if Oakeshott would need to revise his judgment today, now that cooking books have been replaced with the kinds of sophisticated gadgetry that would have Buckminster Fuller, the archsolutionist who never stopped fantasizing about the perfect kitchen, brimming with envy.
Paradoxically, as technologies get smarter, the maneuvering space for interpretation—what Oakeshott thought would bring cooks in touch with the world of practices and traditions—begins to shrink and potentially disappear entirely. New, smarter technologies make it possible to finally position, as it were, the cookery book’s instructions outside the tradition; almost no knowledge is required to cook with their help.

Mitchell favored checkered pants and jackets that reminded some of the attire of a used-car salesman. He managed his company with an informality and dedication that inspired employees.
“George avoided all publicity,” says Clark, the senior executive. “He was just work, tennis, work, tennis, work, tennis.”7
Mitchell evolved into an unusual energy baron. A few years earlier, he had met R. Buckminster Fuller, a futurist and an early environmental activist. Fuller believed human sustainability was in jeopardy and that societies needed to turn to renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power. Mitchell became convinced of the need to pursue alternative energy options in addition to fossil fuels.
“It took me three or four days to understand what he was talking about,” recalls Mitchell, who hosted Fuller at various conferences.

Instead, most individuals who viewed computers as tools for liberation were politically agnostic, more focused on forming alternative communities, and inclined to embrace new technology as a means to better achieve personal liberty and human happiness—what one scholar has labeled as the “New Communalists.” Stewart Brand, Stanford University biology graduate turned publishing entrepreneur, became a leading voice for the New Communalists through creating The Whole Earth Catalog. Deeply influenced by cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, electronics media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, Brand pressed NASA to publicly release a satellite photo of the Earth in 1966. Two years later the photo adorned the cover of the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Publishing regularly between 1968 and 1971, Brand’s catalog identified and promoted key products or tools for communal living and, in doing so, sought to help “transform the individual into a capable, creative person.” The only “catalog” to ever win a National Book Award, the publication was inspirational to many personal-computer pioneers including Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs, who later reminisced: “The Whole Earth Catalog . . . was one the bibles of my generation. . . .

Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Carter Center, May 12, 2009, http://www.cartercenter.org/news/editorials_speeches/BostonGlobe-energy-security-hearings.html.
decentralized power options: Carter also did a great deal to strengthen America’s reliance on fossil fuels, by encouraging more coal use and the exploitation of domestic oil. His problem was energy security and he was very catholic in his approach to solving it. Williams (1997), 325.
commitment to fundamental change: This process might have been inevitable, for as Buckminster Fuller famously pointed out, “All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a giant peak after which miniaturization sets in. After that a more economic art takes over which also goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less.” Critical Path (1981).
the project and opted out: Hirsh (1999), 82.
any given billing cycle: The most standard “promotional rate” structure was to charge less the more electricity was used.

And as abruptly as Young started, he stops. He’s done. I realize that I’ve been holding my breath for some time: we both exhale and sit in silence for a moment, like a pair of strangers who’ve just had reckless sex and now don’t know what to say to each other. Later research reveals “buckyballs” to be a recently discovered form of molecule, named after the brilliant thinker/ inventor/engineer/cosmologist Buckminster Fuller. And if I can’t quite remember what the question was by this point, I have managed to grasp that I’m being asked to contemplate the near-certain extinction of my species through something other than boredom or stupidity, possibly in my own lifetime, or even next Tuesday.
And now my mind reels back to the previous evening and a fund-raising dinner for Buzz Aldrin’s National Space Society.

“Rita made planter’s punch.”
“Well, pour me some.” He vanished with the baby and brought her back freshly changed, with her bottle.
Laura sighed. “You had a good time, David, didn’t you?”
“You wouldn’t believe what they have out there,” David said, sprawling onto the couch with the baby in his lap. “I met another one of the Andreis. I mean his name’s not Andrei, but he acted just like him. Korean guy. Big Buckminster Fuller fan. They’re making massive arcologies out of nothing! For nothing! Concretized sand and seastone. They sink these iron grates into the ocean, run some voltage through, and get this: solids begin to accrete … calcium carbonate, right? Like seashells! They’re growing buildings offshore. Out of this ‘seastone.’ And no building permits … no impact statements … nothing.”
He gulped three inches of cloudy rum and lime, then shuddered.

In one dusty attic, he found a bulky manuscript called The Tribes and the States in which Sidis argues persuasively that the New England political system was profoundly influenced by the democratic federation of the Penacook Indians.
At this sentence, a kind of shock passed through Phædrus, but the article went on.
When Mahony sent Sidis’s book The Animate and Inanimate to another eccentric genius, Buckminster Fuller, Fuller found it a fine cosmological piece that astoundingly predicted the existence of black holes — in 1925!
Mahony has unearthed a science fiction novel, economic and political writings, and eighty-nine weekly newspaper columns about Boston that Sidis wrote under a pen name. The amazing thing is that we may only have tapped the surface of what Sidis produced, says Mahony. For instance, we’ve found just one page of a manuscript called The Peace Paths, and people who knew Sidis have said they saw many more manuscripts.

We know the gateways link to at least three other planets. There may be many that we don’t know of. We don’t know how to create them or close them; all we can do is send people through, or pile bricks in the opening.” He nearly bites his tongue, because there are more than three worlds out there, and he’s been to at least one of them: the bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built by the NRO from their secret budget. He’s seen the mile-high dome Buckminster Fuller spent his last decade designing for them, the rings of Patriot air-defense missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped fighters from the Skunk Works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols the empty skies of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and apartment blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families and thousands of support personnel. In event of war they’ll be evacuated through the small gate that has been moved to the Executive Office Building basement, in a room beneath the swimming pool where Jack used to go skinny-dipping with Marilyn.

In a sense, autistic children are right: the universe is nothing but matter in motion. My “normal” mental equipment leaves me chronically dumbfounded at the fact that a microdot and a spoonful of semen can bring about a site of thinking and feeling and that a blood clot or a metal slug can end it. It gives me the delusion that London and chairs and vegetables are on the inventory of the world’s objects. Even the objects themselves are a kind of delusion. Buckminster Fuller once wrote: “Everything you’ve learned … as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
In another sense, of course, the world does have surfaces and chairs and rabbits and minds.

Snyder (www.fourhourbody.com/surgery) The pre-surgery shoulder dislocation while I’m sedated is disgusting. Fun watching if you enjoy YouTube videos of folks face-planting off of Swiss balls, etc.
Biopuncture: Common Questions and Answers (www.chiromedicalgroup.com/biopuncture)
Overview of Biotensegrity (www.fourhourbody.com/biotensegrity) This explains the fascinating functions of fascia. Steven Levin, an orthopedic surgeon, explains how the principles of tensegrity seen in R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes apply in the human body, with bones acting as the compressive elements and the soft tissues as the tension elements. If you are at all geek-inclined, read “The Importance of Soft Tissues for Structural Support of the Body.” It’s outstanding.
Egoscue (www.egoscue.com) Egoscue is a postural therapy program with 24 clinic locations worldwide. The program is designed to treat musculoskeletal pain without drugs, surgery, or manipulation.

He’s also a lifelong Republican, although he came of age in the Eisenhower era, before much of his party veered to the far right. He devoted his professional life to global development, not a typically conservative cause, and he voted for President Obama in 2008. But he supported Mitt Romney in 2012, even though I was still working for the President.
My mother is from a New England family dating back to the Mayflower, with relatives including the architect Buckminster Fuller, the journalist Margaret Fuller, and the novelist John Marquand. Her father, Charles F. Moore, Jr., was, among other things, a newspaperman, vice president of Ford Motor Company, and an adviser to President Eisenhower. Later in life, he served as a town selectman in Orleans, the small town on the Cape where my parents now live. My mother’s older brother, Jonathan, spent his whole career in public service, helping to preserve the Cape Cod National Seashore as a Republican congressional aide, holding influential jobs at the U.S.

The spillway is best seen during the rainy season when the lake is full.
38.512201 122.104748
Lake Berryessa’s massive overflow drain is known affectionately as the “glory hole.”
Also in California
Winchester Mystery House
San Jose · The former home of Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester gun fortune, contains doors to nowhere, stairs that stop suddenly, and secret passages.
Dymaxion Chronofile
Stanford · From journals to blueprints to dry-cleaning bills, Buckminster Fuller documented his life in staggering detail. The full archive is stored at Stanford University Library.
Methuselah Tree
White Mountains · Germinated circa 2833 BCE, this gnarled bristlecone pine is one of the oldest trees in the world.
OREGON
Arborsmith Studios
WILLIAMS
Arborsculpture is the craft of shaping living trees into works of art and architecture. The term was coined by Richard Reames, one of its pioneering practitioners and the owner of Arborsmith Studios—a combination nursery, design studio, and al fresco art gallery.

Some goals contradict other goals, but that's the challenge of designcreating a good set of tradeoffs from competing objectives. Some characteristics of design quality are also characteristics of a good program: reliability, performance, and so on. Others are internal characteristics of the design.
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Here's a list of internal design characteristics:
Cross-Reference
These characteristics are related to general software-quality attributes. For details on general attributes, see Section 20.1, "Characteristics of Software Quality."
Minimal complexity The primary goal of design should be to minimize complexity for all the reasons just described. Avoid making "clever" designs. Clever designs are usually hard to understand.

“I haven’t been in an accident,” he said. “It was deliberate.”
“Jesus, they beat you to keep secrets?”
“You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. I’m not damaged.”
“Look, there’s thickening here” – I indicated the ankles – “and your ribs – that crazy zigzag pattern of interlocks. Broken sometime, obviously. And – ”
“Look at my spine,” he said. I rotated the image in the video frame.
Buckminster Fuller, I thought. It was fantastic. A cage of triangular projections, all interlocking in ways I couldn’t begin to follow, much less understand. I reached around and tried to feel his spine with my fingers. He lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling.
“I can’t find it,” I said. “It’s all smooth back there.” I let go of him and looked at his chest, then prodded his ribs. They were sheathed in something tough and flexible.